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Language Forgetting

- "I really should have kept up my Spanish";
- "I wish I could speak Chinese the way I used to as a child";
- "My German is going to pot".

We have all heard statements such as these from people of all ages, be they active or dormant bilinguals. They are often said with regret and sometimes a hint of sadness or even guilt.

One should keep in mind, though, that language forgetting is simply the flip side of language acquisition and that it is just as interesting linguistically. But the attitudes towards it are very different. Whereas language acquisition is seen positively ("Isn't it wonderful that you're learning Russian"!), language forgetting is not talked about in such terms.

The process of language forgetting begins when the domains of use of a language are considerably reduced, if not simply absent. It will extend over many years in adults and is marked by hesitant language production as the speaker searches for appropriate words or expressions. There will also be frequent intermingling of languages as he or she calls on the dominant language for help; pronunciation is marked increasingly by the other language or languages; "odd" syntactic structures or expressions are borrowed from the stronger language, and so on.

Language comprehension is less affected, although the person may not know new words and new colloquialisms in the language that is being forgotten. People who are in an extended process of forgetting a language avoid using it because they no longer feel sure about it and they do not want to make too many mistakes. If they do have to use it, they may cut short a conversation so as not to have to show openly how far the attrition has progressed.

There is increasing work being done on language forgetting in adults but there has been less work done on how bilingual children lose a language. Case studies exist, however, and one that is well known was reported by anthropologist Robbins Burling. His family had moved to the Garo Hills district of Assam in India when their son, Stephen, was sixteen-months-old. There, Stephen quickly acquired Garo since he spent a lot of his time with a local nurse.

When the family left the Garo region a year and a half later, Stephen, was bilingual in Garo and English, maybe with a slight dominance in Garo. He translated and switched from one language to the other as bilingual children do.

The family then traveled across India and Stephen tried to speak Garo with people he met, but he soon realized that they did not speak it. The last time he tried to use the language was in the plane going back to the United States. He thought that the Malayan boy sitting next to him was a Garo and, as Robbins Burling writes, "A torrent of Garo tumbled forth as if all the pent-up speech of those weeks had been suddenly let loose." Within six months of their departure from the Garo Hills, Stephen was having problems with the simplest of Garo words.

At the end of his article, Robbins Burling raises an issue that has not yet been resolved by research: "I hope that some day it will be possible to take him back to the Garo Hills and to discover whether hidden deep in his unconscious he may not still retain a remnant of his former fluency in Garo that might be reawakened if he again came in contact with the language."

I contacted Robbins Burling a few years ago and asked him if Stephen had indeed gone back to the Garo Hills. He replied that he hadn't but that he had acquired Burmese at age six in Burma. He spoke it fluently for a while but then forgot it. Robbins Burling finished his message by stating that in his early childhood Stephen had learned three languages and had forgotten two!

Stephen, now an adult, would probably agree with the following: All those who have a childhood language deep inside their minds have a hidden wish that one day they will be able to reactivate it and use it in their everyday life.

References

Burling, Robbins (1978). Language development of a Garo and English speaking child. In Evelyn Hatch (ed). Second Language Acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

my father's first language was Italian. He spoke Italian until he started school at the age of seven. By the time I was on the ground, his Italian was reduced to a very small vocabulary and no apparent grammar. I did not know he had ever been fluent in Italian until some time after he died.
He suffered from Dementia and Alzheimers for the last 22 years of his life, and once when he was in late stages of the disease I asked him to say "bottle" for me because I have always enjoyed the way he pronounced it, with the glottal stop "bot-ul" anyway, instead of saying that, he said "Bottiglia" in perfect Italian!

Language development involves two processes in the brain, (1) an operating system of voice recognition and (2)a data base of vocabularies and contents.

The voice recognition system is developed during a critical period in the first 9 months after birth, with the automatic wiring of language neurons. As an operating system, like the CPU, it is kept for life.

The data base of vocabularies and contents is like a hard disc. You can input data any time. But you can easily lose it after prolong disuse.

How do we know that the voice recognition system is kept for life?

We can only recognize sounds that are found in our voice recognition system. When the brain receives an alien sound not found in the system, it will be directed to the nearest sound in the system. Japanese cannot distinguish between L and R. Indians will say "dan giu" instead of "thank you".

For people who have completely forgotten a particular language, they can pick it up much faster than people who have never been exposed to that language. They can imitate and pronounce the words like a native speaker. This ability is not found in people who have never been exposed to the language.

Multi-lingual speakers are far more gifted in learning new languages than monolingual speakers. Multi-lingual speakers have a voice recognition system far more powerful than that of a monolingual speaker. When you can recognize a sound, you can say it. When you cannot recognize a sound, you can't.

So, don't worry if you have forgotten a language because of prolong disuse. Spend a little time on it in building up the necessary vocabulary, the language will come back quickly.

This interesting article took me back to my childhood, where during my grade-school years, I was made to attend on the side an all-boys Yeshiva class, no less, where I excelled in fluently reading "Tanaj" and "Jumesh" /these words at least I have not forgotten.../(which are the Talmudic scholars' writings) in Hebrew and fluently translate them on-the-run (i.e., I was interpreting back then and did not know it) into Yidish. This was in an inland town of Uruguay, and on our visits to the Capital, my father used to show me off to rabbis there who were stunned that a mere "girl" of eleven (insert slightly sexist-deprecatory tone here) should be able of such proficiency (the boys were preparing for bar-mitzvah, their 13-yr old coming-of-age), whereas I did it merely to compensate for the fact that I was not born a boy...Well, to cut a long story short, I have completely and absolutely forgotten the languages and the characters, except for a slight superficial recognition, and a few standard words of Hebrew (modern). What I do understand of Yidish comes from my buried childhood memories and the fact that I taught myself German, of which I have a basic knowledge (am able to read, mostly understand, take dictation, but would not dare to speak or write). I have no doubt that if I set my mind to it I might pick up Hebrew faster than if I had never been exposed to it before.

And another interesting case is that of Alzheimer disease and how it affects language. My now deceased father-in-law, who had been born in Ucrania, brought up in Poland and was able to write and read both in Russian and Polish, came to Uruguay at twenty-something and met and married my also Polish mother-in-law. Around the house they only spoke in Spanish, so that none of their five children learned Polish. Then over time, when my father-in-law was around 80, he developed Alzheirmer's and progressively forgot his fluent Spanish, even the names of things that were part of his stock-in-trade. Until a day came when he could no longer communicate in Spanish and regressed to Polish, so he was limited to speaking with my mother-in-law - until speech deserted him completely, but that's another story.